With great excitement I'd like to announce that we are joining the RedHat family. The CentOS Project ( http://www.centos.org ) is joiningforces with Red Hat. Working as part of the Open Source and Standardsteam ( http://community.redhat.com/ ) to foster rapid innovationbeyond the platform into the next generation of emerging technologies.Working alongside the Fedora and RHEL ecosystems, we hope to furtherexpand on the community offerings by providing a platform that iseasily consumed, by other projects to promote their code while wemaintain the established base.

and also sees new members:- - Fabian Arrotin, who comes to the board nominated from the community- - Carl Trieloff, Karsten Wade, and Mike McLean join us, nominated byRed Hat.

Please join me in welcoming the new members to the Board.

The key operating points of the Board are going to be: Public, Open,and Inclusive. You can find more information about the governancemodel, the board, and the operating policies we are proposing athttp://www.centos.org/about/governance/

Furthermore, some of the existing CentOS Core members are moving totake up roles at Red Hat, as a part of their sponsorship of the CentOSProject, allowing these people to work on the Project as their primaryjob function. This includes Johnny Hughes Jr, Jim Perrin, FabianArrotin, and myself. We will be working with and operating out of theRed Hat Open Source and Standards team in the CTO's Office.

- -------------Some of the things that are not changing:- - The CentOS Linux platform isn't changing. The process and methodsbuilt up around the platform however are going to become more open,more inclusive and transparent.- - The sponsor driven content network that has been central to thesuccess of the CentOS efforts over the years stays intact.- - The bugs, issues, and incident handling process stays as it has beenwith more opportunities for community members to get involved atvarious stages of the process.- - The Red Hat Enterprise Linux to CentOS firewall will also remain.Members and contributors to the CentOS efforts are still isolated fromthe RHEL Groups inside Red Hat, with the only interface being srpm /source path tracking, no sooner than is considered released. Insummary: we retain an upstream.

Feel free to reach out if you have specific concerns about how thischange impacts your CentOS story. URLs mentioned at the bottom of thisemail should be a good starting point.

- -------------Some of the key things that are changing:- - Some of us now work for Red Hat, but not RHEL. This should not haveany impact to our ability to do what we have done in the past, itshould facilitate a more rapid pace of development and evolution forour work on the community platform.

- - Red Hat is offering to sponsor some of the buildsystem and initialcontent delivery resources - how we are able to consume these and whenwe are able to make use of this is to be decided.

- - Sources that we consume, in the platform, in the addons, or theparallel stacks such as Xen4CentOS will become easier to consume witha git.centos.org being setup, with the scripts and rpm metadata neededto create binaries being published there. The Board also aims to puttogether a plan to allow groups to come together within the CentOSecosystem as a Special Interest Group (SIG) and build CentOS Variantson our resources, as officially endorsed. You can read about theproposal at http://www.centos.org/variants/

- - Because we are now able to work with the Red Hat legal teams, someof the contraints that resulted in efforts like CentOS-QA being behindclosed doors, now go away and we hope to have the entire build, test,and delivery chain open to anyone who wishes to come and join the effort.

The changes we make are going to be community inclusive, and promoted,proposed, formalised, and actioned in an open community centric manneron the centos-devel mailing list. And I highly encourage everyone tocome along and participate.

- -------------Contacting us works best via the established community mechanisms.- - Real time chats via IRC ( http://wiki.centos.org/irc ) ; To keepconversation sanity intact, I recommend using the #centos-develchannel to discuss project related activity while #centos is best usedfor end user conversations.

- - The Mailing lists are a great way to interface with the developers,contributors and the community at large ( http://lists.centos.org ).As with IRC, we recommend using the centos-devel list to talk aboutproject related issues while the general centos list is best used forend user conversations.

- - The CentOS Forums are another great way to engage in conversationwith other users ( http://www.centos.org/forums ), if you prefer thatmechanism.

All the above mentioned venues are public and open to the community,should you wish to discuss something privately, you can email us atcentosdev at centos.org. Press requests should be sent topress at centos.org. Please note that it will take us much longer toreply to private requests as compared to content on the public venues.

- -------------In the coming days we are going to create opportunities for people tocome and get involved in more face to face interactions. Starting witha regular scheduled office-hours format hangouts (http://wiki.centos.org/OfficeHours ) that start early next week. Weare trying to split the sessions into two different timezones so as tomaximise the number of people who are able to join. The sessions willrun live, with #centos-devel on irc.freenode.net being used forconversations alongside.

We are also running a CentOS Dojo on the 31st Jan 2014 at Belgium (http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Brussels2014 ); The event will runtwo tracks, with lots of opportunities for social interaction betweenthe talks; followed by CentOS in the Clouds Hack sessions. We arelimited in the number of people we can accomodate, so I encourageeveryone to register early.

- -------------I want to take this opportunity to thank all the sponsors, thecontributors and the CentOS team members for all their help over theyears, the project is built completely upon those contributions - andI look forward to seeing even more involvement from everyone as wemove forward.

- -------------A Request:

We are still sorting out content in various places and it might take aday or two to get everything in place. In the mean time if you findsomething stale and perhaps misleading in the new context ( or the oldone! ) please drop in on #centos-devel at irc.centos.org and let us know.